Our Night at the Capitol Hill Bed & Breakfast

We had a wonderful, one-night stay in a beautiful downtown Denver Bed & Breakfast, the Capitol Hill Mansion B&B the Sunday before the Memorial Day holiday. We were so delighted with our short stay, this B&B made our top five.

Kath arrives at the stately mansion.

The gardens are as meticulously cared for as the mansion.

Just a 15-20 minute walk from the 16th Street Mall, the Capital Hill Mansion B&B is ideally located in Lower Downtown Denver. We decided to eat on the Mall. The Cheesecake Factory was packed, but Ling & Louie's, right next door, seated us at an outdoor table on the patio immediately upon arrival. We enjoyed the Black Orchid Ahi, among other delicious dishes.

My lovely date perusing the menu.

Kath's favorite apéritif, a Midoritini.

Capitol Hill Mansion by night.

The huge whirlpool in the room was relaxing after our dinner and stroll.

The 2011 Festival opens June 25th. Check it out here.

Check out the "Central City Opera Festival Blog: Behind-the-Curtain" here.

Capitol Hill Mansion B&B

We are getting away to a new B&B this weekend. Can't wait.

Pasque Flower Suite. Whirlpool in the turret of the Victorian manse.

Apparently the Capitol Hill Mansion Bed and Breakfast has a great view of the Colorado Capitol, hence the moniker. We'll see.

Check out their web site here.

Triskaidekaphilia!

Eschew Triskaidekaphobia.

Give Triskaidekaphilia a chance!

13 is a lovely number.

Check it out here and here.

13 is a Lovely Number!

If 13 is an unlucky number, why is the great "Love" chapter of the Christian scriptures 1 Corinthians 13 and its 13 verses?!

By the way, the numeric value of the Hebrew word for Love (Ahavah) is 13.

1 If I speak in the tongues of men and of angels, but have not love, I am a noisy gong or a clanging cymbal.

2 And if I have prophetic powers, and understand all mysteries and all knowledge, and if I have all faith, so as to remove mountains, but have not love, I am nothing.

3 If I give away all I have, and if I deliver up my body to be burned, but have not love, I gain nothing.

4 Love is patient and kind; love does not envy or boast; it is not arrogant

5 or rude. It does not insist on its own way; it is not irritable or resentful;

6 it does not rejoice at wrongdoing, but rejoices with the truth.

7 Love bears all things, believes all things, hopes all things, endures all things.

8 Love never ends. As for prophecies, they will pass away; as for tongues, they will cease; as for knowledge, it will pass away.

9 For we know in part and we prophesy in part,

10 but when the perfect comes, the partial will pass away.

11 When I was a child, I spoke like a child, I thought like a child, I reasoned like a child. When I became a man, I gave up childish ways.

12 For now we see in a mirror dimly, but then face to face. Now I know in part; then I shall know fully, even as I have been fully known.

13 So now faith, hope, and love abide, these three; but the greatest of these is love.

1 Corinthians 13

Happy Mother's Day

Happy Mother's Day, Mom!
I hope you've already received this card in the snail mail.
Here are the words, which are difficult to read in this picture.

A Mother is...
someone who has
a generous heart
and a capacity for giving
that's as limitless as the sky.
With her understanding
and caring,
she creates a safe place
for her family...

Thank you for being that mother!

Love, Your son

Happy 6th of May!

As I pointed out in my Seis de Mayo post last year, Cinco de Mayo. is not as important a date in our family as Seis de Mayo (the 6th of May). Many, many (!) years ago, my brother, John, was born on that date, and not nearly as many years ago, I met my wife, Kathy, on that auspicious date. Johnny and Jimmy (as we were then called) one Christmas in front of the tree.

Dad, Johnny and I with Puppies. My beautiful wife posing in Cadiz, Andalucia, Spain just months after arriving in Spain for our first tour of duty at the Rota Naval Base.
My still-beautiful wife in our "mile-high" living room a few years ago.
A day of celebration for our family, the 6th of May. Happy Birthday, my brother. Happy Anniversary of our Meeting, my wife!

Phizzog

A friend playing Words for Friends recently intimated that I might not know the meaning of the word Phiz, which I had just played for a hefty number of points on a Triple Word score.

I owe my knowledge of this lighthearted, little word (and its cousins, phizzog and physiognomy) to two sources: Rex Stout's Nero Wolfe detective novels and Carl Sandburg's poem, Phizzog. I have read all of the (nearly 50) Nero Wolfe novels multiple times (of course, by reading I also mean listening to the unabridged audiobooks). They are among my favorite books, and Nero's (Rex's) love of language has improved my own vocabulary, grammar, and diction immeasurably over the years.

So here are some quips and quotes from the novels. Invariably the speaker is Wolfe's sidekick, assistant, and man Friday, Saturday, Sunday, Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, and Thursday, the celebrated detective, Archie Goodwin. (Wolfe, himself, despised slang and never used it!)

"Then I proceeded to cleanse the form and the phiz and get the figure draped for the day."
—The Rubber Band (1936)

"The one in front was a six-footer with a long narrow phiz and grizzled hair…"
—“Too Many Detectives” (1956) from Three for the Chair

"Cocking an eye at his earnest phiz, which was passable, but no pin-up, I would have said that she was overpricing him."
—“When a Man Murders” (1954) from Three Witnesses

“ 'I see.' Jessup looked at me, saw only an open and manly phiz, ready to help, and went back to Wolfe."
—Death of a Dude (1969)

"I had of course done a survey on him, including the contrast between his square-jawed rugged phiz and the indications that the race of fat and muscle would be a tie in another couple of years, but I wasn't ready for a final vote."
—The Second Confession (1949)

"She is not amused but after looking at Archie’s 'open, intelligent, interested, sympathetic phiz…' "
—Please Pass the Guilt (1973)

"It was no pleasure to look at Wolfe’s gloomy phiz, so I looked back at the performers."
—“The Next Witness” (1955) from Three Witnesses

"A peep through the glass showed me a phiz only too well known, so I slipped the chain on before I opened the door to the extent of the six inches which the chain permitted."
—“Bitter End” from Death times Three (1985)


PHIZZOG
By Carl Sandburg
This face you got,
This here phizzog you carry around,
You never picked it out for yourself
at all, at all—did you?
This here phizzog—somebody handed it
to you—am I right?
Somebody said, “Here’s yours, now go see
what you can do with it.”
Somebody slipped it to you and it was like
a package marked:
“No goods exchanged after being taken away”—
This face you got.


These slang/shortened forms (as well as alternate spellings such as phizog, vizzog, fizzog) derive from physiognomy, the face or countenance, especially when considered as an index to the character: a fierce physiognomy. See http://www.dictionary.com/. (Note the similarity also to the word visage.)

Happy Birthday, Bonnie!

Above: Spain. Three little girls with birthdays in April.

Chipiona. Bonnie's 3rd birthday.

Maryland. Bonnie's 7th birthday.

Spain. Bonnie's 11th Birthday.

12th. Spain.

Idaho Springs. Indian Springs Resort. Birthday at the Hot Springs.

Japan. Capt. B's Retirement.

Central City Opera April 2011 Wallpaper

Check out the Central City Opera web site for all the details of this summer's festival season.

Central City Opera March 2011 Wallpaper

March 2011 Wallpaper provided by the Central City Opera House Association.

Caption reads: Horace and Baby Doe Tabor were married on March 1, 1883. Their marriage has been immortalized in the opera THE BALLAD OF BABY DOE, pictured here from the 1956 (world premiere), 1996 and 2006 Central City Opera productions.

We saw the 2006 production, and it was very enjoyable.

Happy 30th, Hannah

Happy Birthday, Hannah!

Share the Warmth Coat Drive

Share the Warmth Coat Drive

Affordable American Insurance is teaming up with Metropolitan State College in the "8th Annual Share the Warmth Coat Drive" for the Denver Rescue Mission.

In the upcoming months, many will be cold this winter. Help "Share the Warmth Coat Drive" this February by donating your used coats to one of our many Insurance office locations around the Denver Metro Area.

Last year, The Coat Drive for the Denver Rescue Mission was a huge success, collecting 581 coats!!! The Denver Rescue Mission was very grateful for such a wonderful donation.

This year we want to double that number. With YOUR Help, I think we can match their donation.

Share the Warmth by donating your old coat to someone in need. We not only help our clients in their time of need but also our surrounding community. Help us reach our goal!

Feel free to drop by any of our Affordable American Insurance offices between January 28th and February 8th to drop off your donation.

By the way, even if you don't have any old coats lying around, you can still help. Drop by a Goodwill or ARC or Salvation Army store, or any of the other organizations that help people and pick up some great coats at reasonable rates. That way you'll help the people in the cold stay warm, and you'll help the people in the stores help others.

Central City Opera February 2011 Wallpaper

February 2011 Wallpaper provided by the Central City Opera House Association.

Scenes from Carmen.

We saw it performed by Opera Colorado in 2005, when the Ellie Caulkins Opera House opened. Can't wait to see the Central City Opera performance.

What is a Cockle, Anyway?

So the other day I heard a rabbi talk about "the cockles of your soul." I think he was just trying to be different, because of course, the phrase is "warming the cockles of your heart." So naturally, my inward response was, "What in the world is a cockle, anyway?"

Well, notwithstanding some of the scurrilous definitions at Urban Dictionary (none of which come close to the real meaning of the phrase), it is a well worn idiom in English dating to at least the middle of the 17th century.

Quoting from the site World Wide Words: "Something that warms the cockles of one's heart induces a glow of pleasure, sympathy, affection, or some such similar emotion. What gets warmed is the innermost part of one's being. It's not that surprising that it should be associated with the heart, that being the presumed seat of the emotions for most people. But what are the cockles?"

One theory of its etymology is from the heart shape of certain bivalve mollusks, as pictured above. There are other theories, about which you can read here and here.